This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented, or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below, after the main part of the detailed description section.
Transmission in wireless networks can be contention based (CB) or contention free (CF). CB transmission refer to transmissions where different user equipments are allowed to use the same radio channel without pre-coordination, and these types of transmission carry an inherent risk of collisions. 3GPP LTE uses a contention free uplink data transmission which is may not be as efficient for small UL packet transmissions as compared to CB transmissions due to, for example, the relatively higher signalling overhead that is required.